Sens at Land’s End

Puck Lit reviews are probably going to slow down a bit now: I start back to school in just over a week, and won’t likely have as much time to read, which is sad but then again hockey season is starting up again soon anyway so I can go back to filling this space with posts about actual hockey. YAY!

Puck Lit Project Review #6: Cold-Cocked: On Hockey by Lorna Jackson

Plot Summary: This is another non-fiction book so there’s no plot per se, but basically it is the author’s chronicle of rediscovering hockey later in life and following the Vancouver Canucks through the 2002-2003 and 2003-2004 seasons. There’s also a little bit of her personal biography thrown in: stories about her attempts to learn more about her father’s service in World War II, her efforts at recovering from a long-term knee injury, and her sheep farm.

Genre: Non-Fiction, Reflections on Hockey

Hockey Content: Obviously, there is a lot in this one about the Canucks and the players who were with the team at the time the book was being written, with Markus Naslund, Ed Jovanovski, Trevor Linden, and Todd Bertuzzi (this was the season of the Steve Moore incident) as the main players. Mostly, we get Jackson’s observations on the Canucks’ games as well as their fans and players. For Sens fans, new Sens/former Canucks Jarkko Ruutu and Alex Auld figure in briefly. There are thoughts on Dany Heatley, and there’s a chapter in which Alfie gives birth to quadruplets!

Okay, it’s a sheep named Alfie. Had you wondering for a second though, didn’t I?

Choice Quotation: “Right before puck drop, Hockey Night in Canada’s Ron MacLean … goes wistful and chokes out Canadian hockey’s season-ending uber-cliché: We all dream about playing in the NHL, we all dream about playing in the Stanley Cup finals. We do not. Ron is over-acting about a certain brand of boy raised in cold places where ice happens every year, everywhere. Do we all dream Ron’s dream? Most little girls don’t (Shaunavon redheads notwithstanding) and really not girls raised more rain forest than ice-covered pond. The NHL engine — media pistons pumping and spewing — is fuelled ineptly by such mythomania. It distorts our national identification with the game and lies about those who love it. And it excludes a population of fans willing to commit, to stay loyal, to spend money.”

My Thoughts: I was very happy to read this book because out of all the Canadian books that reflect on the game and what it means — a pretty huge genre, really — this is, as far as I can tell, the only one written by a woman. As much as I do enjoy reading the meditations on the game written by the men who’ve played it, I must admit that I started to feel rather annoyed and excluded the last time I read one of those “we love the game because we grew up playing on frozen ponds” things. I never played on a frozen pond, but I still love hockey, and I certainly don’t think it’s right to state that only those kids (boys) whose parents (fathers) built them backyard rinks truly understand and love the game. Women not only get left out of the myth of hockey, but Jackson is also quite right: the NHL often does a pretty terrible job of marketing to female fans (see this post at My Three Favorite Things for more on that), and it’s not like there aren’t any of us out there.

So, I think it’s about time a woman sat down and wrote a book about why she loves hockey. Cold-Cocked fills a niche I’d been wanting to see filled, and it fills it well. It’s a very good read. Jackson’s thoughts on the game and how women view it are interesting. She writes that a hockey season is like a story, which is something that’s occurred to me often as I’ve been thinking back on 2007-2008 and wondering what went wrong. We can’t possibly know what an individual game or goal is going to mean until we’ve seen all the games and all the goals. Jackson argues that women in particular read the game that way, and that we like the stories involved. We like to know the background, the context for what is happening. While I’m not totally convinced that male sports fans don’t take an interest in that sort of thing, I’m certain she’s right that women do. She interviews Trevor Linden at one point, and asks him why he thinks female fans are so loyal to him. Linden says he thinks it’s because many of them have grown up watching him play, which I think gets at what Jackson is trying to say: women sometimes become personally involved in a way that men maybe just don’t.

Connected to this is another part of the reason I think women love Trevor Linden, which is that he comes across as upstanding, smart, and gentlemanly. He’s that guy who you just know would never do you wrong. He’s like hockey’s version of Lloyd Dobler (somewhere, my friend the Doc who loves both Linden and John Cusack is nodding). And with this, we get at the other thing women enjoy about hockey that men — at least straight men — probably do not. Jackson is totally frank about her schoolgirl crush on golden-haired Markus Naslund and recounts her fantasies about some of the players (totally G-rated, okay). Not that I personally indulge in that type of thought about hockey players … not that I would ever daydream about a fun-filled afternoon playing Rock Band with Rick Nash at his house, which I might imagine being something like Sugar Mountain, with a fridge full of ice cream and cake and a cotton candy machine, and also probably a trampoline — if I imagined Rick Nash’s house at all, that is. Which I do not, and I certainly would not have such a weird fantasy about him anyway. But that is beside the point: it seems inevitable that if you put a bunch of really fit men on ice and have them perform heroic feats of hockey greatness for us, women are going to find some of them hot. It’s just a fact of life, like how guys are always going to check out the ice girls. It doesn’t make us any less knowledgeable about hockey, and it definitely doesn’t make us puck bunnies. We just see things differently, and I don’t quite get why that’s a problem for so many men. I like the fact that Jackson deals with this aspect of female fandom in her book, instead of trying to cover it up to appeal to the more “serious” (those are sarcastic quotation marks, by the way) male audience.

Rating: 4 pucks out of 5. Jackson gives a great account of seeing the game through feminine eyes. I would recommend this book certainly to my fellow female hockey bloggers, who I’m sure would enjoy it, and to any male hockey fan who wants a different perspective.

I woke up just before 3:30 this morning and watched sexy kayak dude Adam van Koeverden race to silver in the K-1 500. Van Koeverden has become a great example for me of what Jackson writes about women liking a good story, not to mention a handsome face. Before he bombed the K-1 1000, van Koeverden was pretty much just a hot kayaking machine to me. I figured he was invincible. But seeing him absolutely lose the plot in his first final, and then seeing his complete and utter disbelief at how things had turned out made me much more invested in the outcome of his second race. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen someone look so genuinely lost on television before. Adam van Koeverden: awesome and unstoppable kayak juggernaut? Good story, sure. Adam van Koeverden: struggling after an unbelievably bad performance and unsure about his ability to bounce back? Now that’s compelling. In my barely-awake state, I cheered my head off for him. This is one of Olympic moments I’ll remember for a long time.